Shipped

Graphica

Galaga-style browser game built as a marketing tool for a graphic t-shirt brand. Not a banner ad. Not a discount popup. A game people actually want to play — that happens to convert players into customers.

375KB Gzipped · 60 FPS · Mobile-optimized
The Problem

Indie brands can't outspend their way to attention

Savvy Ersatz is a graphic t-shirt brand. Small operation, limited budget, competing for attention against brands with six-figure ad spends. The standard playbook — Meta ads, discount codes, influencer posts — requires either money or an existing audience. They had neither.

The question wasn't "how do we advertise?" It was "how do we create something worth sharing that also drives sales?" A game changes the economics. Browser game marketing campaigns typically achieve 5-20% conversion rates versus 1-3% for standard e-commerce. The engagement is the marketing.

What I Built

A complete game and go-to-market strategy

Graphica is a six-stage vertical shooter built with Phaser 3 and TypeScript. Players fight through five waves of enemies with increasing difficulty, then face a four-phase animated boss fight. Beat the boss, get a promo code. One-click copy to clipboard. Direct path from gameplay to purchase.

But the game was only half the deliverable. I also built the complete go-to-market strategy: economic modeling ($25 retail, $10-12 COGS, 15% optimal discount), channel allocation ($2-3K budget across paid social, influencer seeding, and organic), conversion projections (60-120 t-shirt sales), and a phased launch timeline.

Phaser 3.90.0 TypeScript 5.8.3 Vite 7.1.7 Vercel
Technical Decisions

Performance is the product

Phaser 3
Purpose-built game framework, not a hacked-together Canvas experiment. WebGL rendering, built-in physics, sprite management, audio system, and input handling. Phaser gave me arcade-quality gameplay without reinventing collision detection.
Object Pooling
Bullets and explosions are recycled, not created and destroyed. A vertical shooter spawns hundreds of projectiles per minute. Without pooling, garbage collection stalls kill frame rate on mobile. With pooling: consistent 60 FPS on mid-range devices.
Touch Controls
Two-zone system: left side moves, right side fires. Multi-touch support with gesture suppression — no accidental zooms, scrolls, or pull-to-refresh during gameplay. Safe area insets for notches and rounded corners. If it doesn't work on a phone in someone's hand, it doesn't work.
Boss Design
35 HP across four phases with escalating mechanics. Phase 1: single shot. Phase 2: 3-bullet spread, faster movement. Phase 3: spawns minions, becomes invulnerable behind a blue shield. Phase 4: doubled difficulty, fastest speed. Each phase has a 1.5-second animated transformation. The boss is the payoff — it has to feel earned.
Bundle Size
1.59 MB total, 375 KB gzipped — well under the 5 MB target. Pixel-perfect rendering (no smoothing), optimized sprite sheets, compressed audio. A player on mobile data should load the game in under 2 seconds.
The Numbers

Game specs and GTM projections

6
Stages
4
Boss
Phases
60
FPS
Target
375KB
Gzipped
Bundle

The GTM strategy projected 6,000-10,000 game plays driving 60-120 t-shirt sales on a $2-3K total budget. The model identified five critical gaps that typically undermine game-to-commerce campaigns: post-purchase engagement loops, dual-metric tracking, game-to-commerce conversion bridges, sustainable economic modeling, and fraud prevention for promo codes.

What This Proves

Strategy and engineering in one person

Most marketing strategists can't build the product. Most game developers don't think about conversion funnels. Graphica is both — a technically polished game and a data-backed marketing strategy conceived, built, and delivered by one person.

The game is shipped and deployed on Vercel via GitHub. The GTM strategy includes economic modeling, channel allocation, conversion projections, and fraud prevention protocols. From "what if we made a game?" to playable product with a business plan attached.

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